Nothing too eventful lately. Work has been discussions of technical possibilities and usability for access to servers, discussions of quotas, way too much discussion of viruses (and the writers are in cahoots now, or at least in direct competition - see March 2nd entry), backup and printing policies, and just general performance problems and approaches. Basically touching everything, spending a lot of time on nothing. Outside of work I've been looking at way too much photo stuff. Basically trying to decide what I want to get before I go on my trip. Filters aren't cheap, which is a pain. I'm sorta trying to work out what can be done on the computer side (mainly color shifts), and what can only be done or can be done better on the film side (ND, polarizing, gradiated filters, etc). Picked out a cheap, small (like 15" long and 3" diameter when folded), light (under 2 lbs) but stable tripod. It's mount has one drawback in that it can't tilt to vertical, but that can be worked around. It actual provides slightly more horizontal stability in that way with the small size. The great part is it's small and light enough I can carry it with me all the time. Stupid photography stuff is expensive though, and I gotta get what I need to do city, ocean, traditional landscape, and desert in about two weeks. I also should really get more memory. I have a 512MB CF card right now, which holds about 150 shots. I don't really need to go more than a day, but it'd be nice to have some fallback even if it's only a 128MB or something in case I fill up the card. Should be interesting to see what I end up with.

Sunday went pretty well. Got up and went to Salem, which was sorta interactive so it kept me awake. After that spent some time cleaning the house, since people were coming over. A lot of people in the house, but not as many as superbowl and definitely a different environment with family of all ages. After that read some more geeky stuff online, and banned another IP from the mail server for a few hours. It was sending enough the servers didn't like running through all the virus infected machine checks for all of them since it was probably around 1000 in a few minutes time. My total for Sunday for alerts is 2602, which is fewer than Saturday (which is actually 2930 after I realize I missed some) but still way too high. A few more non-ResNet machines infected too. :( Finished off the night by watching Outbreak. Interesting movie and kept my attention, but nothing stood out as great. After that I had an IM from wiljefv with this game in it. It's more strategy than timing, which is more fun in my opinion. I'm currently at level 30 but stuck and tired, so we'll see how big of a replay factor it has (since there doesn't appear to be a way to save the games).

Well, Friday went pretty well. In case you somehow still don't know, it was my birthday. Went to Chipotle for lunch which drew a decent crowd and was good. The workday went pretty well, basically caught up on stuff. Replied to some emails which were over a year old. It's interesting working in an environment where email is the prevalent means of communication. Things come up, aren't important or other things are more important, so they just sit there for weeks or months and then they come back up and things continue like nothing happened since everyone has the whole history of what happened. After work I ended up going and hanging out with some friends who I don't hang out with all that often. Dave brought his camera as usual and took pictures. That was fun since it was layed back and was pretty much just sitting around and chatting. Ross and I chatted for quite a while about interesting stuff. After that I went home and was finishing up some stuff. Then I got this really odd email along with notices for attempted posts to a couple mailing lists, and it looked like a virus but none that I recognised. I grabbed the zip file and threw it on a fileserver to let it scan, but it found nothing. Finally figured out it was Bagle/Beagle.C, which was only discovered Friday so even the daily DAT update wasn't new enough to catch it. I submitted a blackhole request for it and told all the mail servers to reject messages since it didn't identify them yet. Then more started coming in I had four machines blocked, and then Nick happened to come online since he was at Bethel and started yanking them off the network. Much better way of dealing with them, and more effective than just blocking from our servers. After 9 of them and a bit of dead time, we called it a night after changing the webmail login screen to have a warning and leaving a page for my boss to figure out some sort of block on the mail servers in the morning. In the morning the mail servers were configured to block all small zips for the weekend, hopefully with something more fine grained by Monday. I also changed the virus/blackhole notice management system to read my email from the servers and automatically submit requests to yank machines from the network when they started sending lots of messages, which meant no more having to read them. Which is a good thing since I got 2845 blocked email notices from on campus machines on Feb 28 alone (and 77 so far today). The craziest part about this worm is it sends a zip file containing a .exe, and that exe has to be run to get the virus. I almost hope a significant number of people get this and are yanked from the network. It doesn't do much damage (opens a backdoor, and since by default resnet incomming connections are blocked...), but it'd probably make them more careful with attachements at least for a while. Saturday evening was dinner with the family at Applebees, which was good. I got my mail, which included my check for $13.86. Other things of interest include my Jabra EarBoom Winder headset arriving. I've used it a decent amount over the past day or so, and like it a lot so far. It doesn't sound bad (I like it a lot better than my dad's EarWave Boom, and it seem more comfortable too). It's very light so it doesn't get uncomfortable after wearing it a while, and it has a very nice way of setting on the edge of the ear without putting pressure on any one point. The only drawback I've found so far is it sorta uses gravity to hold itself in, and hooks in a way that takes advantage of the boom's leverage, so if you're laying on your back it tends to slide slightly and you have to push it in again after 10-15 minutes. Given that it has the nice windup cord, very good sound, and is so comfortable, that can be forgiven though. Well, Sunday means a crowd at my house. I should get some rest.

I should have been in bed two hours ago. Beagle/Bagle.C sucks. 6 machines already BlackHoled at Bethel, one off campus from which we're refusing mail... Looks like it's sorta settled down, hopefully it'll stay that way until morning. :(

So Tuesday night, right after I post (well, like 10 seconds before, but I didn't know until a minute or so later), Avalon goes down. Stupid thing... Wednesday involved documentation, moving a server, meeting with people, way too much caffeine, and drafting an announcement. After work I just sorta sat around. I ended up ordering a headset for my phone (cell phones are nice because they're small, but after about a half hour get annoying to hold). Too bad all the wireless ones are really expensive. Could maybe get one used for $50, but when a good new wired one is well under $20... Anyways, didn't do anything special for shipping and it was almost delivered to my house less than 12 hours later (I wasn't there to sign for it), which amazed me. UPS is the only shipping company that never seems to do that... Finished off the night by starting a conversion of Nothing So Strange from MPEG-4/aac (yes, a legit copy) to MPEG-2/ac3 for DVD. Sorta weird since I hadn't seen one in aac before, and transcode doesn't support aac natively. Had to pull the stream out and decode with faad and use them separately. Of course transcode doesn't like the file format for some reason either, so I may have to extract the streams, convert and re-multiplex. I like them easier when they're simple... Thursday work was similar, but not as big of things. Servers acting up a bit, trying to fit things different places, etc. I did finish building a server and brought it up to the server room today. I got sick of the crazy slow elevators and just grabbed it and went up the stairs. People looked at me sorta weird for that one - server in one hand, dew in the other, walking up the stairs like it's perfectly normal. Anyways, after work did nothing for a bit again, and then went to see The Passion of the Christ with some people from Bethel. I have to say that movie is really good. People say it is very violent, and I sorta see their point compared to a lot of mainstream stuff, but it doesn't seem much different than some other movies that came to mind. On the flip side those movies are fiction and while some are also designed to invoke ideas about the wrong in the world, this is actually made as a documentary. In my opinion there it's not possible to really portray the awful truth of what happened without actually showing it, and assuming that is the intent they actually probably cut too much. I do have to admit I am coming from a perspective of not being easily disturbed - I didn't feel any urge to look away at any point, although I realise a lot of people do. The sad truth is this isn't made up - people have been tortured both based on beliefs and just because some people are really messed up (no not making a rip on the director in this instance, but refering to the actions of the main character), and society can't always ignore it and pretend nothing happened. Hopefully this movie will make people really think about a lot of different things. OK, enough ranting before I go from content into the technical side. *%@! red reel serialization dots - and I thought yellow was bad...

Monday consisted of a lot of WebDAV stuff, since we decided t try and implement and drop AFP for home directories in one week. The timeline is pretty aggressive, but I think it's definitely doable. Got the server up and running, and did some testing. Also did some poking around with Windows and domain controllers replicating across firewalls. Seems if they can sorta see each other but not really so fail they don't like to retry until they reboot. Oh well. After work helped Betsy get her site up and running with Movable Type. After that pretty much did nothing until way to late. Tuesday I woke up to many many pages. Turns out rwho on the netsaint machine got stuck on something and stopped processing incomming packets, meaning it considered everything else down. It's a problem when the load on every server is unknown but the servers still show as up so the system doesn't find dependencies to consolidate. Managed to get it all back up and running after disabling paging to prevent further excessive annoyances. Hopefully I can get some time to do paging limits soon. Spent a decent chunk of the day building a server, which went pretty well. Also changed monitoring for viruses slightly to handle suspected viruses through the email server and request removal from the network after enough of them. We had a case of MyDoom.f today, for which the email server rejected/dropped all the emails, but only by general characteristics and not knowing what it actually was. Also did a bit of research on some other suspect machines after finding out about a compromised machine. Windows boxes are just annoying... Then there's the whole WebDAV documentation piece, which hopefully I can finish up tomorrow morning so we can announce, but we'll see. Pretty much just relaxing after work again. Found lots of interesting debug info in my phone. Like it uses 2mA at idle, unless the backlight is on. Then it uses 102mA. Given that during a call it was averaging around 250mA without the backlight (350mA with), it looks like running for long times with the backlight will drain the battery significantly compared to standby. Good thing to know. I also managed to hang my laptop's kernel by probing at a USB serial adapter. Oops, won't be doing that again. Yea, that's the kind of stuff I do for fun - I guess I'm a bit of a geek. :)

Friday... It's never fun when important people say or do things and schedules get swapped around. Spent most of the day migrating people off a server. Actually went incredibly smooth, I'm sure partially since we picked probably the easiest group to do it to. Ended up staying a bit late, and talked to Joe for a long time. Gave me time to finish up everything though, and what could have turned into a couple checks over the weekend was done before I went to bed. Saturday slept in really late. Then sat and just listened to music for a while. I need to figure out a way to create playlists based on quality though. Even 160kbps encodings can sound quite bad when in a mix of higher quality ones. Took a couple pictures, and played with gimp a bit. For the evening went over to Dave's sister's place, where he was dogsitting, and watched Cinema Paradiso and hung out with friends. Good flick, although the quality was a bit odd at times on the technical side (weird film grain issues). Was very wide awake due to all the sleep, but Sunday morning not sure what happened to that. Kept waking up for like an hour earlier than I needed to, but then could hardly stay awake in church. In the afternoon worked on my photo web application some more. I now have the ability to edit captions and descriptions, as well as rearrange images on the admin area (on my laptop). The public interface also has comments now, and I have a way to sync them with a single command too. It makes it a lot easier when you can design the database around replacing parts separately. Ended up with a bit of a headache, not quite sure why. Sorta like lack of caffeine (yea, I know that's bad), but it's not like I hadn't had any in a long enough time for withdrawal. Decided to pick a relatively short movie though, and watched Behind Enemy Lines. The pounding inside my head quickly gave way to the pounding on my chest by the movie. That movie is very well done technically. The picture was awesome, and the sound even better. I especially liked the way they handled sudden panic type events, mimicing the way the human mind tends to work there, and otherwise with perspective and camera shaking. The soundtrack while sounding a bit odd if you're just looking at it or hearing it, but if you're actually immersed in the story is very well chosen. The plot was relatively decent too, but had the usual failings of an action movie in that regard. :( The movie's definitely meant to involve you by making you feel like you're there with both video and sound, so if you haven't seen it on a good system you may want to watch it again. Anyways, I think it's time for me to try and sleep off the headache, and hope that tomorrow's not a mess as a result of Friday's work...

Today went OK, but I was really tired. Ended up poking trying to stabilize some stuff (some servers not getting appropriate domain info), but managed to break a few things temporarily. I think I got them all fixed though. Didn't do anything too interesting after work, mainly due to the tired thing. I'll be glad when the weekend comes.

Started off the day getting up early, and picking up my cable at the post office. That place was rather packed, but I ended up running into another Bethel person, and since we were both only picking up packages (rather than sending) we got to go to the head of the line and they went and looked for them together to save time. Work went OK, rebooted a machine a bunch of times to compile drivers against the kernel in both smp and non-smp mode. Gotta love when new versions come out. Also found and cleaned out some junk buried in Active Directory. For being production and from such a big company you wouldn't think it'd leave crap in random places which pop up later to interfere, or it'd at least handle it and clean it up when it sees a conflict and starts causing problems. I guess there's a reason why I like linux. After work poked around on a windows box with the data cable. Played with the pc suite a bit, and found the fun verizon instigated restrictions that nokia has for my phone. I hear there are some easy ways around them though, so we'll see. I also couldn't get the data connection going through windows dial up networking - the calls just dropped and it couldn't ever even get ppp going. And it needed a ton of drivers to even see the cable. I got bored with that eventually (the only useful thing seemed to be backing up my data), so headed home. Got there, and plugged the data cable into my linux machine. Instantly recognises it and I can talk to the phone. So far 10 seconds versus 10 minutes, not too bad. Then I configure ppp and dial right in to the system. And people say Windows is more compatible with things than Linux... Data over Cell is rather slow, since my phone refuses to accept the high speed commands (as well as half of nokia's other documented commands). I'm suspecting that's another verizon instigated thing... I think I'll still take free unlimited 14.4 over paying a couple pennies a minute for regular dialup, and that's if I can even find a phone line anywhere to tap into... So anyways, I'm happy that it's working, now it's just how much time I'm gonna spend poking with getting it faster over the next couple weeks.

Avalon managed to stay up and running all day today, which was very nice. I also spent some time testing WebDAV stuff. Turns out drop folders and trying to write to read only stuff causes some problems. Both Windows and Mac OS have issues when messing with emulated disk devices which disappear as the driver effectively crashes. Managed to lock up multiple machines multiple times. Also spent some time looking into Shibboleth, which looks really cool. After work went home to discover a notice of attempted delivery for a registered mail package rather than a box with my data cable. Not sure how a package originating outside the US managed to come registered, but now I get to stop by the post office on my way to work tomorrow or wait a couple more days. Guess I get to get up early... While poking around on the net I had my Karma playing on random and it hit The Dolphin Cry. Almost forgot about that song, so out came Distance to Here. I think that's gonna be most of my playlist the next couple days, since I really like the style of it. The style lends itself to acoustic stuff well, but not sure how much I like the acoustic versions of those songs - something about the studio recording style seems to be part of the sound. Watched The American President to finish off the night. Not sure where I got my recommendation, since that's normally not the type of movie I like too much. Other than the DVD transfer being horrible technically, the movie was decent though. I like the fact that this movie came out 4 years before Office Space, the "Yeah, didn't you get the memo?" immediately reminded me of Samir, since it was said in the exact same way in a very similar context. Anyways, to top off the night my brother found this notice in the police report section of the local paper. That's New Brighton for you I guess.